Dear Bill,

This is Calvin again. I hope it’s okay if I call you Bill. Meaning no disrespect at all, but Bill is easier to type than Mr. Watterson and this is going to be a long letter.

I am writing this letter for two reasons. One is because it has to be my English project, which is worth 50 percent of my final grade. My teacher gave me the idea but said it better be a long letter if it’s going to be worth 50 percent.

So where do I start? They say a person my age knows maybe thirty thousand words, so picking the first word out of thirty thousand is the hardest part. After you pick the first word, it weirdly picks the next one, and that one picks the one after that, and next thing you know you’re not in control at all—the pen is as big as a telephone pole and you’re just hanging on for dear life—

Sometimes I riff like that. Sorry.

Everything I’m going to say in this letter is true with some real stuff thrown in. You may wonder how you can believe that, coming from a recently diagnosed schizo kid, but I’ve figured out there’s a difference between the meaning of the word real and the meaning of the word true. Reality is all the stuff that won’t go away, like school and gravity, no matter how much you wish it would. It’s the ceiling your imagination bumps up against. People with my condition just keep floating on up as if there weren’t any ceiling, with every so often a few hard falls and then more floating.

But true doesn’t float. It just is.

So this is how it started, Bill: I got sick.